I know MediaBiasFactCheck is not a be-all-end-all to truth/bias in media, but I find it to be a useful resource.

It makes sense to downvote it in posts that have great discussion – let the content rise up so people can have discussions with humans, sure.

But sometimes I see it getting downvoted when it’s the only comment there. Which does nothing, unless a reader has rules that automatically hide downvoted comments (but a reader would be able to expand the comment anyways…so really no difference).

What’s the point of downvoting? My only guess is that there’s people who are salty about something it said about some source they like. Yet I don’t see anyone providing an alternative to MediaBiasFactCheck…

  • @[email protected]OP
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    25 months ago

    That’s the website, not the bot. I don’t think the website is malware…lol

    I think the problem is that the website uses the American standard, where reality is anything left of center

    • Pika
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      5 months ago

      I agree with your statement here, the person who is calling it malware is misusing the term.

      In order for it to be classified as malware you need to prove that it’s intentionally being malicious, which from the provided evidence is unable to be done. in fact every step of evidence has been in the opposite direction, just because it gives potentially invalid information from its source doesn’t mean that the bot is malware, the intent is noble, regardless if the information is fully valid or not. You can call the website malware if you like(although that’s still a hard stretch) but the bot wouldn’t be malware, it’s working as intended and doing the job exactly as it described it would be,which is using the website to determine credibility of articles.

    • @leftzero
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      5 months ago

      Malware is ill intentioned software.

      The bot is a bot, i.e., software.

      It’s intended to drive the overton window right until fascism is perceived as mainstream, and probably beyond, either as a means of imposing fascism on society or to cause chaos and destabilisation, which is evidently ill intentioned in any case.

      It’s ill intentioned software, i.e., malware.

      It’s also pushing its ill intentioned disinformation onto the community’s users against our will, so it’s also spam, if being malware wasn’t enough.

      (As for the website, it’s clearly a disinformation psy-op with the same ill intentions; whether a website counts enough as software to count as malware is open to debate, though, even if its ill intentions are not.)